{"id":10112,"date":"2016-11-16T12:08:47","date_gmt":"2016-11-16T17:08:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bestbassgear.com\/ebass\/?p=10112"},"modified":"2016-11-16T16:01:36","modified_gmt":"2016-11-16T21:01:36","slug":"bass-of-the-week-doner-designs-jazzman","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bestbassgear.com\/ebass\/bass-of-the-week\/bass-of-the-week-doner-designs-jazzman.html","title":{"rendered":"[Bass of the Week] Doner Designs JazzMan"},"content":{"rendered":"

For a hobbyist builder, Steve does some darned fine work.<\/p>\n

Steve from Doner Designs<\/a> writes:<\/p>\n

Doner Designs is a fancy name for my son and I who build as a hobby and also donate some of our works to charity. We don’t do any build-for-sale work but do flip our personal gear sometimes to make room for the next project.<\/p>\n

Since we build for fun, we like to try new and unusual things, never repeating ourselves. Most of our basses have had three pickups, elaborate electronics and sometimes exotic woods. In the spirit of trying new things, we wanted to do a single pickup bass this time with a 24 fret neck and also wanted the pickup to be something really special, potentially worthy of calling our signature pickup. Even though the highest frets are hard to reach on this body, we think the fingerboard extension completes the look since there is only one pickup. The pickup is located in the “Warmoth sweet spot” which approximates MM pickup positioning. <\/p>\n

We call this bass and its pickup the “JazzMan”. The inspiration for the pickup name and design is Nordstrand’s BigMan pickup<\/a> which stuffs two Big Singles into a MusicMan cover. The JazzMan pickup has two Nordstrand split coil J pickups under a MM cover. We also thought about calling it the BigBoy or the LittleMan, but liked the JazzMan name best.<\/p>\n

We worked directly with Nordstrand on the custom pickup. To help keep the price reasonable, we used two standard split J pickups but the key to the sound is that we used two different J pickups and they are pushed to the outer edges of the shell. The one toward the neck is an NJ4se<\/a> whereas the the bridge side is an NJ4sv<\/a>. The differing winds have the effect of making the two sides sound as if they are further apart – the neck side has more low end and the bridge side has more high end even though the separation between the two coils is not that significant.<\/p>\n

The body is chambered swamp ash with a unique quilt maple top. Finish is dark tung oil and paste wax. Neck is unfinished roasted maple with an ebony fingerboard. We went with an ebony fretboard so that the extension would be very sturdy. Stacked knobs are for a four band Audere preamp. Balance control pans between the two halves of the pickup. The strings are ultra responsive LaBella Supersteps. Weight is 9 lb 14 oz. <\/p>\n

We think the bass sounds great, but have not had a chance to do any recordings yet. As one might think, it sounds a little bit like a J bass and a little bit like a MM bass. The ability to blend between the two sides of the pickup along with the four band equalizer make the bass extremely versatile.<\/p>\n

Now that this one is off the bench we are looking forward to giving this one a long-term test drive and diving into our next charity project which is a time machine theme bass.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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Sound Clip<\/h3>\n